Posts tagged ‘Nala’

The cover of Action 20 (Jan. 40) continues to feature Superman, if not the story that he was in.

George Taylor sends Clark Kent out to Hollywood to do a series of stories on movie stars for the Daily Star. It’s actually meant to be his vacation time, but Clark does not complain. Taylor looks definitely stockier than he used to.

Siegel and Shuster start his Hollywood time by having Clark meet actress Dolores Winters. Although she is friendly at first, and agrees to an interview later, she becomes cold and distant, cancelling it when Clark shows up.

Dolores invites a bunch of Hollywood big names to a party aboard her yacht, which she turns into a big kidnapping.

Superman is on the case. He uses his x-ray vision, which is shown closer to the way it would be, as beams emerging from his eyes.

Superman reaches the ship, and one look into Dolores Winters’ eyes is enough to convince him that, somehow, this is really the Ultra-Humanite. Probably because there was no easy way to have him figure it out. And Dolores explains how his/her men put his brain into her body.

She dives overboard at the end, escaping from him, but will return.

Pep is still in his hometown in this Guardineer story, and is playing baseball on the city team when Jimmy Dee crash lands his plane on the diamond. Pep helps save the man, who offers him a job as his mechanic as he competes in the Air Races.

Apparently aside from needing no qualifications, the mechanic sits in the rear seat of the biplane – perhaps to perform repairs while the fly.

At any rate, Jimmy passes out and with no teaching time whatsoever, Pep takes the controls and wins the race.

Things look bad for Clip, but he pulls out his harmonica and starts playing, which calls the tribe he had showed it to last issue. They rescue him. So it’s not really Clip that is the hero of this issue, just the most musical person in it.

Bernard Baily concludes Tex Thompson’s battles with the zombies in this issue.

It’s not that great a story, and really I only included it to show this page, with both Gargantua, and Africans in it. These are all black people, so one would expect them to be drawn in a similar style. But that is not the case, not at all. The Africans actually look like Africans, more or less, while Gargantua still appears as a caricature.

Guardineer sends Zatara on another mission against aliens in this adventure, which begins as a poisonous mist starst circulating.

Zatara meets a fairy-looking woman, Nala, who helpfully explains that the mists are sent by the Moon Men. Despite being from the Moon, they have set up in a secret city in India.

Nala leads Zatara to the city, and he uses a variety of magic acts to defeat and humiliate the Moon Men, before working with Nala to use their own poisonous gas against them.

Together they completely wipe out the Moon Men. It’s bloodthirsty Zatara back in action. But Nala is happy with him, offering to take him to the Moon. Despite her promise, and that of the editor announcing that next issue will see Zatara on the Moon, it never happens. Or if it did happen, it consisted of events unsuitable for a children’s comic.